01/26/2026
Dr. Barry Gardner, MD, the Fetal Rescue and Adoption medical director, sent a link to a quite interesting article about an up-and-coming Dutch product called an AquaWomb. The following are excerpts from the article to pique your interest. But, consider reading the entire article for your knowledge.
This machine could keep a baby alive outside the womb. How will the world decide to use it?
Premature birth remains the nation’s second-leading cause of infant death, and even those who survive may face crippling complications, from chronic lung disease to lifelong neurological damage.
Artificial wombs promise to change that trajectory, saving more babies and sparing more parents from grief. But growing a child outside the body also cuts to the core of how people imagine pregnancy and parenthood.
“This kind of device would create a new stage of human development, something we’ve never had to describe or regulate before,” says Elizabeth Chloe Romanis, a medical law scholar at Durham University.
..their prototype mimics the constant shelter of pregnancy. The amniotic fluid holds at 99.7F, just above a mother’s core temperature. A double-layered bag hangs in the tank’s center. Its inner sac flexes as the baby grows, from pomegranate-sized at 23 weeks to the heft of an eggplant by 28. The outer silicone layer is stiffer, with just enough give to resist the baby’s kicks and encourage its muscles to stretch and strengthen....
In today’s neonatal intensive care units, doctors can only step in after the fact, using ventilators and incubators to force these fragile organs to function. That mechanical intervention brings its own risks of lasting injury. And once exposed to air, the lungs are irreversibly activated; you can’t throw the fish back into the water.
Artificial wombs aim to bypass this crisis altogether. In AquaWomb’s design, the baby is delivered via caesarean section into a fluid-filled pouch, where it can be transferred from mother to machine. Once inside the transfer chamber, clinicians reattach the umbilical cord to a human-made placenta, a fist-sized device lined with catheters delicate enough to pull carbon dioxide from the blood and cannulas robust enough to push oxygen and nutrients in.
If it works, the placenta buys time that the baby’s lungs cannot yet provide. If it fails, the clock runs out in two minutes, the limit before oxygen deprivation risks permanent brain damage. The baby must remain immersed in fluid throughout this entire sequence, never realizing it is being born.
[11/05/2025 The Guardian, Infant and Child Mortality by Lucy Tu, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/05/baby-alive-outside-womb]
